


arrhythmia

by galateaGalvanized



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 22:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7820293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galateaGalvanized/pseuds/galateaGalvanized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The new Overwatch facility is quiet after midnight, and Angela Ziegler can't sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	arrhythmia

**Author's Note:**

> For Julie.

Time seems to pass in an irregular rhythm at midnight, and the spaces between seconds are empty and dry.  Angela counts the pauses when she can't sleep, as if counting heart beats.  On nights like these, the arrhythmia reminds her of too many moments spent with her finger on a pulse, praying for a heart to contract again.  To drown out the feeling, she walks. 

The new facility is staffed with a skeleton guard of fresh-faced hopefuls, all of whom nod at her as she passes.  The smells of cologne and shoe polish underlay the recycled air, and the sharply ironed suits cut lean shadows on the floor.  The recruits are clean shaven, bright-eyed, and rigidly at attention.  She doesn’t know their names any more.

Plastic boxes tower in most of the offices that she sees; one room is filled only with paper towel holders and petri dishes.  Overwatch once flooded these halls, but it is trickling back in.  Even in the newness of the Giza facility, its layout is similar to the Swiss one that she knows so well.  She follows the instinct of hazy memories as she walks.  Her feet seem to know what she’s looking for better than she does.

The walls change from a dull gray to an intimidating black, and she has to pull her pass card from her sweatpants for the first time since she left her room.  The retina scans will be installed next week, but they’re managing with older tech until they can accumulate the necessary biometric data.  Doors open, soundless, and then lock behind her.

Three clicks later, she hears the shouts.

The whirr of machinery fills the halls, and the staccato of her old tennis shoes is a frantic rhythm as she races towards the noise.  If the Overwatch machinery is beginning to rebel—if the AI that Helix Security was building has gone haywire—if she isn’t safe, even here, in the newly beating heart of Overwatch—

She skids into a room bigger than the one they use to store the helicarriers.  The shouts echo around the cavernous structure, and it takes Angela a hard few seconds to locate the source.  Suspended twenty feet up within a massive metal harness, Pharah is moving through the air at speeds rivalling those in her Raptora Mark VI suit.  The harness springs from her back and limbs like the legs of a multi-jointed spider, accommodating her twists and maneuvers in a frictionless glide.  She flips upside down for a vertical dive, twisting at the last second to fly with her back adjacent and parallel to the ground, firing off shots from an empty rocket launcher.  She twists again to flip onto her stomach, swinging her arms wide in an attempt to pull up from the floor.  Suddenly, the legs of the machine blink red, and Pharah smashes downwards into the ground.  The machine drags her a few feet across the cold tile, finally leaving her to weakly press her hands into the floor in an attempt to get to her feet.

“Fareeha!” Angela shouts, breaking out of the awed trance she had fallen into.  She has a few medical tools on her, but she’s not sure she’d be capable of removing the machine’s bindings in order to administer even basic first aid.

To her surprise, the metal cuffs have completely unlocked, dangling empty and open above Pharah’s shaking body.  Angela goes to her knees.  She puts a hand to Pharah’s shoulder and pushes, and Pharah goes easily, turning onto her back in surprise.

“Mercy,” she says, propping herself up—barely—on her elbows.  “I mean—ah, Angela.  What are you doing here?”

Angela laughs.  “Well, apparently someone needed a doctor.  Where does it hurt?”

Pharah manages to sit up completely, her breath still coming in harsh bursts.  Angela’s hand slips off her shoulder.  “Everywhere, thanks,” she says, gusty and rough.  “But I’m mostly just tired.  What are you doing here, really?”

Now that Angela can focus more fully on Pharah, Angela can see that she’s not even wearing a high-tech training gear.  What Angela had mistaken for an impact suit is just a black athletic shirt and ripped, bloody leggings.  Without the Raptora suit, without even the metal harness, Pharah seems so much smaller. They’ve been working together for some time, fighting missions side by side and wing by wing.  Still, it’s sometimes hard to see the girl Angela used to know in the austere determination of Pharah’s face.  This close, in the dwindling hours of the very early morning, Angela feels like she’s seeing Fareeha again.  It makes it easier to answer honestly.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Angela admits.  “I don’t really sleep much, these days.”

Fareeha smiles.  “Who does?” she asks.  Sweat beads on Fareeha’s nose, and Angela is so close that her eyes cross slightly to watch the sweat drop fall.  “I feel guilty sleeping more than five hours, these days.”

“Is that why you’re here—training?”  Angela gets an arm under Fareeha’s broad shoulders, and she can feel the muscles bunch and contract as Fareeha gets her knees, and finally her feet, beneath her.  Sweat soaks into the cotton of Angela’s shirt, sticking it to her skin. 

“You’re stronger than you look,” Fareeha notes, and they move over to one of the long empty tables.  Angela shifts Fareeha onto the table surface and starts rolling up her sleeves.  “And yes.  A single hour of training, a single rehearsal of a particular maneuver—it could be the difference between whether my men live or die.  How can I sleep, knowing that my diligence could decide their lives?”

“How can you train so recklessly, knowing that you’ve made yourself vulnerable to surprise attacks?” Fareeha seems composed of bruises and dermal abrasion, but she doesn’t seem to have any broken bones.  Angela flashes a pen light into both of Fareeha’s eyes, one hand sliding around Fareeha’s wrist.  The callouses on Fareeha’s hands are many and thick, rough and sturdy like turtle shells at each joint of her fingers and at the base of her hand where the suit must rub.  For all the roughness, the skin between Fareeha’s flexor carpi, right next to the pulse point, is soft.

“The only threat I see right now is you.  Angela, please.  I’m fine.”  Fareeha tries to shrug out of Angela’s grip, but Angela persists.  “The machine is designed to leave a few bruises as a punishment for failure.  I’ll be fine in the morning.”

Angela squares her jaw.  “You’ll be fine _now_.  Turn around.”

Fareeha slowly acquiesces, drawing her shirt over her head to reveal a collage of bruises winding rivers down her back.  Angela runs her hands over the worst of them, and Fareeha hisses at the first misty spray of a swelling reducer.  For a few minutes, the only sound in the dark room is the spray of medication and the hiss of Fareeha’s discomfort.  The bruises are already starting to shrink by the time Fareeha shrugs her shirt back on, and her skin is starting to lose its redness.  Angela eyes Fareeha’s bloodied knees and switches to the dermal repair spray, hand seeking Fareeha’s pulse point once more.

With a speed Angela didn’t think her worn body capable of, Fareeha bends down and snags the spray with her free hand while Angela is distracted.  Angela looks up in surprise, wide blue eyes meeting Fareeha’s solemn brown ones.  “Doc—Angela.  Angela, listen to me. I’m going to be fine.”

Angela’s breath escapes from her chest in a ragged cough, catching at the edges of her throat like grief.  “I just,” she says, and she’s not sure why.  Perhaps the lack of sleep is starting to affect her emotional constitution.  “I can’t fix everything.  But I want, at least, to try to fix the things that I can.”

With the training machine deadened, the darkness of the room draws closer around them.  Fareeha pulls Angela next to her on the table, and the cold metal bites its way through her threadbare sweats.  She shivers from more than the cold.

They sit in silence for a few moments, and Fareeha’s breathing settles into a more regular rhythm.  Absently, Angela realizes that she still has her fingers on Fareeha’s pulse, and she can feel its steady drop in speed.  The beat runs through her brain, a single tether in an ocean of emotions. 

“Angela,” Fareeha says at last.  “My dreams of the future keep me awake.  What do you dream of?”

Even in the vastness of the room, the question does not echo.  It stays, soft and quiet, in the space between them.  Angela wants to be strong.

“I dream of the future.  More than that, I dream of the past.”  A thread is fraying on one of her sweatshirt sleeves.  She pulls it absently, and watches it start to unravel.  “I dream of the people I couldn’t save, and the people I did.”

The words sink into the stillness like a pebble in a lake, ripples stirring the air into wakefulness.  It is not an admission she has made before.

“I’ve wondered…” Fareeha pauses, unaccustomed to mincing her words.  There is good reason for her lack of diplomatic missions.  “I knew him too, you know.  Mr. Reyes. He was a good man, but no longer.  So, I wondered--do you regret it? ” Fareeha asks, bold and curious.  The surface ripples pulse again, and the momentum provides a pathway for asking questions that couldn’t be asked or answered otherwise.

“No,” Angela says.  “No, I can’t.”

“You can’t, or you don’t?”

“Both.”  Angela wraps her arms around her waist and tucks her feet under her legs.  She’s always been a little cold-natured.  “I can’t regret saving a life.  I can’t wish that I had let him die, because I have to believe that everyone is worth saving.”  The words trip out of her in a rush.  “The thing I absolutely cannot do is hesitate to save someone who is dying in front of me.  I swore an oath, but more than that—I can’t choose who lives and who dies, Fareeha.  I am not God, though some will argue I play as He does.  I have to believe, and so I do.”  The uncertainty twists the air in her lungs, and she does not know who she is trying to convince.

Fareeha sighs, and her eyes unfocus and drift to some place far from the training room.  “I admire your strength.”

Angela laughs, the sound startling and loud in the darkness.  The sound bounces off the walls, echoing back to them in a hollow ring.  “ _My_ strength?” she asks.  “Why would you, of all people, admire my strength?”

“Look at you, Angela,” Fareeha says.  “I’m struggling with worry about protecting my team and the people I love.  You’re worried about saving the whole world—even the people who would see you killed.”

“I,“ Angela startles, mouth dropped open into a little ‘o’.   “You don’t think I’m wrong?”

“Angela, no.”  Fareeha runs her fingers over the eye of Horus tattoo on her cheek.  “This is a badge of honor, but it is also a promise.  Being a protector is not simply who I have chosen to be; it is who I am.”  She reaches across the scant distance between them, tracing light lines beneath Angela’s left eye.  She leaves them there, lingering, and Angela’s breath catches.  “Angela, a healer is who you are.  You have stayed true to yourself, through war and through great personal grief.  And that is why I admire your strength.”

Angela feels Fareeha’s pulse skip.  She breathes out once, her own heart racing.  An invisible thread is hooked under her rib care, pulling her forward, and the air between them crackles even as it grows thinner.

Without warning, a sound like a tree trunk splitting rips through the air, and in an instant Fareeha drags them both to the floor and under the tables, her body arched protectively over Angela’s as she searches for the threat.  In the distance, the robotic limbs of the training machine straighten themselves into a perfectly symmetrical sphere.

“What on Earth…?” Angela asks.  Amazingly, she still has Fareeha’s pulse beneath her fingers, beating quickly against her fingertips. 

“How?  The machine has a cool down of an hour,” Fareeha wonders, shoulders shifting down and muscles unclenching.  She helps Angela off the floor with a quick pull.  “Sorry, Angela.  I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late.”

“I would not have slept anyways.  Though, I will admit, this was much better than walking the empty hallways.”  Angela shrugs, oddly unwilling to take her eyes from Fareeha’s face or her fingers from Fareeha’s wrist.

Noticing, Fareeha twists her hand and intertwines her fingers with Angela’s.  Her eyes are softer than Angela has ever seen them, her eyelashes a charcoal dust across warm brown.  The corners of her mouth are curved up, just slightly, just enough to wrinkle up across her cheeks and the corners of her eyes.  “Hmm.  How about this, then?  Angela, come with me, and we can both dream of the present tonight.”

Angela smiles, helplessly.  “I’d like that.”

She falls asleep her hear ear pressed to Fareeha’s chest, Fareeha’s strong heartbeat drowning out her fears, her regrets, and the empty silence that she has been breathing into her lungs for so long. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I wrote this for my and Narrendor's six month anniversary, as Pharmercy is her new favorite ship. She gave me permission to post it--and here it is! If you liked the story, please review; I'd appreciate it. Thanks.


End file.
